S. Fred Singer

Starting in late September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its Fifth Assessment Report in three chapters and a summary. Not to be outdone, contrarians have unleashed a barrage of attacks designed to discredit the science before it’s released. Expect more to come.

In the Guardian, scientists Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham point out that attacks cover five stages of climate denial: deny the problem exists, deny we’re the cause, deny it’s a problem, deny we can solve it and claim it’s too late to do anything.

One attack that’s grabbing media attention is the so-called International Climate Science Coalition’s report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science.” It’s written by Fred Singer, a well-known tobacco industry apologist and climate change denier, with Bob Carter and Craig Idso, also known for their dismissals of legitimate climate change science, and published by the Heartland Institute, a U.S. non-profit known for defending tobacco and fossil fuel industry interests. Heartland made headlines last year for comparing people who accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused climate change with terrorists and criminals such as Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski!

Read Singer’s report if you want. But it’s full of long-discredited claims, including that carbon dioxide emissions are good because they stimulate life. It’s not the goal of deniers and contrarians to contribute to our understanding of climate change; they want to promote fossil fuel companies and other industrial interests, a point explicitly stated in the Heartland-ICSC news release.

Public relations man and energy industry lobbyist Tom Harris has launched a new paper arguing that the great scientific academies in the world have misrepresented the consensus that human activity is causing climate change - and yet Harris begins and ends by misrepresenting himself.

The bio in Harris’s paper, released by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, presents him as “Executive Director of the science-based, nonpartisan group, the International Climate Science Coalition.” It says he’s “an engineer and project manager” and it comes close to the truth in adding that he is a “communications professional and media and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic.”

Is there a conspiracy to confuse and distort climate science? Absolutely. If you doubt it, read the John Mashey paper attached (or our book, Climate Cover-up).

Have any crimes been committed? That’ll be for a judge to decide. But given that misleading Congress is a felony offense, there might be some justifable nervousness among the people who coached Wegman through his attack on the scientistists behind the Hockey Stick.

The inspiration for these questions, and some fodder for the answers, is presented in painstaking and well-documented detail in the attached paper (see new version 1.0.1, updated Feb 11, 2010). Prepared by the computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey, it is a roadmap, a reference source and a timeline for the campaign of deceit that began in the 1990s and has come to something of a crescendo with the recent thefts of the East Anglia emails.

Climate skeptics are, not surprisingly, hitting the European speaking circuit in the weeks leading up to the U.N.climate summit in Copenhagen. But what is surprising is that notorious global warming denier S. Fred Singer was described at a skeptic conference today as a Nobel prize winner, a flat out lie.

According to a Belgian journalist who alerted DeSmog to Singer’s appearance today at a skeptic conference in the European Parliament building, Singer was described in event materials as:

The idea that Fred Singer shares any part in the IPCC/Gore Nobel prize is laughable, of course. Other than Mr. Gore, the Nobel committee recognized only the IPCC authors, and they all received framed Nobel certificates. If Singer can produce a framed Nobel, I’ll produce my Olympic gold medal (Singer must eat cereal too, I sure enjoy the prizes inside, although I’ve never seen a Nobel peace prize before).

The 84-year old “grandfather of the global warming 'skeptics'” shows just how over the edge he is in the following exchange:

ABC Anchor, Dan Harris: There are so many scientists who disagree with what you're saying, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], NASA, NOAA, the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society - we're talking about scientists all over the globe.

A two-day gathering of scientists – mostly greenhouse skeptics – in Stockholm in mid-September will focus on: “Global Warming - Scientific Controversies in Climate Variability”. The gathering will feature presentations by such skeptical luminaries as S. Fred Singer, Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon.Not all scientists are enthusiastic about the conference. Tom M. L. Wigley, a top climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote: “You may be well meaning, but I think this meeting idea is flawed. You seem to be making the same mistake as the popular press, who often give equal weight to minority views. It is true that the so-called 'skeptics' sometimes raise interesting points, but they are usually either on the fringe, or are quickly shown to be wrong. The normal process of scientific publishing through the peer review process will eventually sort the wheat from the chaff. I doubt that many mainstream scientists who work in the climate change area will want to come to your meeting. Certainly, it is not something I would want to participate in.”

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.